Old Complete Monster cleanup thread
Welcome to the Complete Monster proposal thread! This is the thread where new Complete Monster examples are vetted, approved, and written up. If you're looking for the general cleanup thread (for cuts, rewrites, expansions, and the like), please go here
Important: Before suggesting any new examples, please read the Frequently Asked Questions and Common Requests List; if you have any questions, the odds are high they are answered there. Additionally, please check here for the earliest date a work can be discussed (usually two weeks from the U.S. release date) and whether the work has already been reserved by another user.
Here is how the process works:
- If you have a candidate to propose, you can simply come right in and propose them! If the character's run is brief, such as a single issue of a comic book, then a simple summary of their actions and any potential redeeming qualities will be enough; for longer-running candidates, an effortpost (EP) might be helpful for organizing the proposal. An EP is not outright required, but please be mindful that if a post becomes too clunky and unorganized, it can be very hard for other people to follow.
- After the proposal, there will be a 72-hour discussion and voting period, where people may ask questions and vote on the candidate. The number of upvotes must outnumber the downvotes by at least five for the character to be considered "approved".
- Three days after the proposal has been made, if the character has been approved, you may post the writeup (the text to be posted on the trope page itself) on the thread and send it to the drafts page. Your candidate will soon be added to the CM subpage. If the work has a page, you should add your candidate to the relevant YMMV page. Voila! It's that simple!
Outside of this process, we do have a few ground rules:
- To keep the thread moving at a reasonable pace, there are some restrictions on when a proposal can be made. There should only be a maximum of four EPs posted both per page and per hour to ensure that nothing gets lost in the shuffle; additionally, each individual troper should only be proposing or writing up characters from a maximum of three works at a time (from initial proposals to end of their voting period). If your proposal would fall outside of either of these guidelines, we'd like to ask you to please wait until they would fit within; feel free to type them up on an outside document, and then when the time comes, you can just copy, paste, and post!
- No plagiarism of any kind. This is a very serious matter site-wide, as the website could get in actual legal trouble over this; as a result, this can very quickly lead to mod intervention. This can take many different forms:
- Direct plagiarism, i.e. wholesale copying. This is not only the easiest to find, but is also the most likely to warrant quick moderator intervention. To be clear, quoting in some places is perfectly acceptable, but it has to be very clear you're quoting from something else and it cannot be anything longer than a sentence or two - if you're quoting an entire work summary from Wikipedia, no one is going to believe you've actually consumed the work, so even if you cite your source, your candidate will be downvoted anyway.
- Self-plagiarism. Even if you can prove that you wrote the same text in both places, the site itself can't contain any of the duplicated text. If you already wrote something once before, it's not too hard to write it a second time.
- Using another site's work as a template for a proposal. Just because you don't copy and paste something directly doesn't mean it's any harder to detect if you're basing parts or all of your proposal on text someone else wrote. To be clear, this doesn't violate site rules and won't lead to mod intervention, but just like if you directly plagiarize, no one will believe you've consumed the work if you're clearly basing your proposal on something else. This thread largely operates on the honor system, and tweaking someone else's work to pass it off as your own is one of the fastest ways to lose trust.
- Votes must be for specific candidates, meaning no blanket voting (i.e. "yes to everyone I missed").
- If you are the first person to downvote a candidate, please provide an explanation of why when you do so. We're here for discussions above all, and a hit-and-run downvote doesn't facilitate anything.
- If a work is already reserved by another user, please don't comment on the work or any potential characters worth discussion before the discussion date. We know how exciting it is when a work has a keeper that you're waiting to talk about, but it's not fair to the person who reserved the work who is just as excited to lead the discussion to see the discussion getting spoiled before they get to do it. On the other hand, if the reservation only has one name attached, shoot them a PM - they may be down for a collaboration, which will get you in on the fun as well!
- Please keep the thread on-topic. While discussing the trope is fun and we encourage people to enjoy it, questions like "who's your favorite CM" are off-topic and can lead to thumps. That's the kind of question to take to people's PMs if they're willing. Similarly, while we encourage friendliness and familiarity with other users, posts should always have some kind of thread-relevant purpose; for instance, if you want to wish someone a happy birthday, feel free to, but if it's the only thing in the post, it's off-topic and needs something else alongside it. Again, though, while we strive for a friendly atmosphere, this is not Facebook; life updates are fun, but unless they have some kind of impact on your thread participation, please do not bring it here - we have Yack Fest for that.
- Please refrain from asking anything along the lines of "How Did We Miss This One?" In almost every case, the answer is simply "No one thought about it before". This Is a Wiki where everyone has different interests, and the fact that people missed a particular candidate, even one that seems like a textbook example of a trope or a character who is particularly iconic in pop culture, means absolutely nothing. The question is disruptive, has a simple and consistent answer, and provides nothing to any discussion.
- If you are suspended from parts of the website, it is still possible to participate!
- For users who are suspended from editing the wiki, you still have full access to this thread. You can propose candidates and write them up with no issues whatsoever; while you will have to ask someone else to post the entry to the relevant pages once it is done, all write-ups are considered thread-approved - as in, done by consensus - and thus doing so does not violate any rules regarding meatpuppeting.
- If you are suspended from the forums, your participation is limited but not impossible. It is still possible for a forum-suspended user to assist in creating the write-up for a character who has already been approved; as previously mentioned, write-ups are inherently considered a consensus-based edit and thus not tied to any one particular user. However, you can not assist in the proposal of a character; as a proposal is based around the forum rather than the wiki, doing so with a forum suspension qualifies as meatpuppeting.
- Please keep all discussions "in-house".
- What other wikis use for CM equivalents is irrelevant here.
- Please be wary of using other wikis, Fandom or otherwise, as sources of information. They are just as fallible as a site like Wikipedia in regards to accuracy because they can be edited by any user, just as this site can.
- Do not attempt to force a communication with an author in an attempt to gather evidence or settle a debate; besides the fact that this is a YMMV trope and thus author intent has variable weight depending on the circumstance, doing so may cross the line into drama exportation, which is prohibited site-wide.
If you would like to use an EP for your candidate, here's the general format. This format does not have to be followed exactly, but these are the main topics that need to be covered:
What is the work?
This is a brief summary of the work you're going to discuss. We don't need a full plot summary here, just however much we need to understand going into the discussion — it can even be as simple as quoting the summary on the work's page.
Who is the candidate and what have they done?
This is essentially the character's biography — who they are, their story, the crimes they commit, and, preferably (though not required), what happens to the candidate at the end. It does not have to include every single thing they ever do — for some villains, we'd be here all day if that was the case — but it should include the highlights of their journey.
Any redeeming qualities? Freudian Excuse?
This is where any potential redeeming characteristics or tragic backstory should be discussed. Do they have a tragic past? Do they show that Even Evil Has Standards or Even Evil Has Loved Ones? Maybe a Pet the Dog moment or two? This is where these should be discussed in full. Not every potential redeeming moment is a clear-cut disqualifier, but we should hear of any potential issues to ensure the character is discussed in full.
Are they bad enough?
A Complete Monster has to be particularly vile by the standard of the work they appear in. Therefore, you should look at what the character does compared to similar characters in the same work. This takes into account things like:
- Their resource level (a human Serial Killer can't stand up to an alien Omnicidal Maniac, but they can be bad by the standard of other human serial killers)
- The amount of time they have to work with (such as a one-shot character versus long-running antagonists)
- The quantity vs. quality of their crimes compared to others (someone with a lower victim count but far more visceral and personal crimes could be considered as equally bad overall as someone with a higher body count but less horror involved)
Essentially, this section is an analysis of the kinds of villainy shown in the work and an explanation of why this particular character's villainy stands out within it.
Final verdict?
This is where you post your final conclusion on the character in question. You can continue elaborating on your reasons or even just say a simple "yes" or "no"; at this point, we've heard everything we need to hear.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: This thread tackles very serious and dark matters on a daily basis. We will be discussing things like murder, rape, torture, human trafficking, crimes against children, and in particularly dark cases, several of these issues at the same time. We keep a lighthearted air, but all candidates carry the general assumption that these are awful individuals committing disgusting crimes. We ask that if you participate, you do so with the requisite seriousness such dark topics require; exclamations of how gross something is, whether serious or sarcastic, are disrespectful to the topics at hand, and if you cannot handle such topics, please do not participate.
And that's everything you need to know. Welcome to the thread!
Edited by Twiddler on Jan 17th 2024 at 5:42:49 AM
![[tdown]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_down_emote.png "[thumb down]"){kind=small}
to Destructinator and the Cell quote. The former is too much of a Terminator parody (it's near impossible for a parody character to count as a Complete Monster) and his biggest crime (trying to blow up the Earth) has been done in the past (FLARG is a holiday that ends in blowing up someone's planet but that's Played for Laughs). Most of the Fairly Odd Parent villains mentioned aren't taken that seriously by the narrative anyway but the Destructinator is only taken slightly more seriously by comparison. The Cell quote just lacks umph and is mostly Cell showing annoyance.
Destructinator, too played for laughs as a Terminator parody and "blowing up the Earth" or "blowing up planets" is extremely more common in that show that the heinous bar is cancelled out
The Ultimate Lifeform
to the Destructinator.
Lord of Space
And here I am again with a new candidate to propose... well, sorta. Today I actually want to discuss a character who previously was approved as a CM but was subsequently cut. This is where her removal was discussed. I couldn't find her first proposal (assuming there is one at all).
What is the work?
The Legend of Tarzan is an animated TV series serving as a Sequel/Spin-Off of Disney's animated film Tarzan. To make it short, the series tells the adventures of Tarzan after the movie.Who is the candidate and what have they done?
Queen La is a former member of the African Waziri tribe who was banished due to her continuos use of dark magic to extend her own life. Sometime in the past, La became the ruler of the abandoned city of Opar and used her magic to turn various leopards into "Leopard Men", having them serve as her slaves (and occasionally zapping and killing them if displeased).La tried to find herself a man a few times before (and they didn't exactly had a nice experience, but we'll talk about that later), until her Leopard Men kidnapped Jane's father, who she ordered to have sacrificed since he was far from her ideal man (but not before zapping a Leopard Man). Fortunately Tarzan and the others come to save the professor, and La immediately gets her eyes onto Tarzan. To make it really short, La puts on a nice facade, attempts to have Jane killed by her Leopard Men, kidnaps Tarzan and the others when they discover this, gives Tarzan the choice of either being hers or die, Jane saves the day and everyone leaves Opar.
In her second appearance we discover that the Leopard Men are all but happy of their situation and want to go back at being normal leopards, so they rebel against La and steal her magic scepter to make Jane the new queen and have her use the power of the scepter to free them. Unfortunately, La manages to trick Tarzan into helping her get the scepter back and, after zapping a few of her minions, decides she will execute the leader of the rebellion in "an especially gruesome and painful way" by having him killed by a giant octopus-like monster. Fortunately by then Jane has managed to explain to Tarzan that the Leopard Men are actually the good guys and so Tarzan returns to Opar and, once again to make it really short, a mess happens: Tarzan and the rebellious Leopard Man are thrown to the monster, La starts zapping various of her minions and burning everything down, eventually Jane breaks her scepter, the zapped Leopard Men come back to life, all Leopard Men turn back into normal leopards, La turns into dust and Opar collapses.
In her third and final appearance La manages to possess Jane and plans to return to Opar to find her lost scepter and re-obtain all her powers. After failing to get Tarzan to help her, she manages to convince Renard Dumont, while also kicking some heavy rocks onto Tarzan as he attempts to follow them. While La finds her scepter, turns Dumont into an ape and rebuilds Opar, Tarzan meets a Waziri who's hunting down the evil queen. As Tarzan and his new friend reach Opar, La gives life to two statues and orders them to kill Tarzan, while the Waziri tells Tarzan that by now there's no hope of saving Jane and that she too will have to be killed alongside La. Tarzan decides that to save Jane he's ready to sacrifice his own life, so he grabs La and jumps down a building, forcing her to possess Tarzan to save her own skin (and, unwillingly, Jane's too) via Tarzan's super strength. Unfortunately with Tarzan's body La becomes much more dangerous than before, and starts chasing down Jane in an attempt to kill her. Fortunately, one of the statues attacks La (not understanding she's possessing Tarzan's body) and so La is forced to move her spirit into a rat. As she attempts to escape, the Waziri captures her, presumably killing her for good offscreen.
Any redeeming qualities? Freudian Excuse?
Nope. While La does have a crush on Tarzan, it's mere lust and not true love since more than once she shows to be willing to kill him, and isn't even bothered by him seemingly dying by the octopus-like monster.Are they bad enough?
This is what got her cut in the first place: it was argued that she actually doesn't do enough, with her being just a standard kill-the-heroes villain who just zaps a few of her minions, that her having killed other men before is essentially complete Offscreen Villainy and then she was compared to Clayton. Let's get something out of the way immediately: I don't know why she was compared to Clayton. Like yeah, ok, Clayton has effectively an attempted kill count within dozens but, unless I'm remembering wrong, he isn't aware of gorillas being sapient. Meanwhile, we see La communicating with animals and she's enslaved a pretty big group of leopards-turned-Leopard Men, so comparing her to Clayton (who essentially just your average poacher) doesn't really make much sense to me.The main thing I want to focus on however is something that in the latest discussion has barely been brought up at all: her previous victims. As you can see here
, here
, here
and here
, her dungeon is filled with human skeletons. Now, I know, skeletons aren't an automatic qualifier (see Captain Guts), but in this case I don't think it's fair to say they're essentially just decorations with no weight whatsoever. Why am I saying this? At some point in her second episode, she and Tarzan have an interaction where Tarzan says "I'm not interested" after she flirts with him and she responds "They weren't either", and IMMEDIATELY after we are shown two skeletons chained to a wall. While it's admittedly a single line, the fact we are shown two human skeletons barely 1 second after she says it makes me feel safe enough in saying the skeletons aren't just decorations but are something to give her words weight, and there's enough of them to also give her a pattern. Honestly, considering what she already does and the fact we know for sure she's killed quite a few men before, she seems bad enough to me.
Final verdict?
Yes.
Ultimate Moral Compass
Sorry Nox, La still comes across as a very standard villain, even with her murders that really don’t stand out from a villain of her type.
Queen La
Frolaytia X Qwenthur of Heavy Object
La and Destructo
Lord of Space
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
What exactly do you mean with "a villain of her type"?
Woagh
to Queen La, a vague kill count that earnestly sounds like a throwaway quip isn't enough.
Goku Black
Uh La
A body count of 3ish seems kinda standard for an evil sorceor tbh.
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."
Lord of Space
Assuming with "3ish" you mean "3", the skeletons shown are much more than 3.
Goku Black
Yeah but the whole thing sounds vague beyond a quip. Maybe you could say those 2 are hers
But like skeletons in animated bad guys lair are pretty common. Like unless they confirm everyone killed in it is a victim. Uh.
Edited by miraculous on Jan 18th 2024 at 12:13:07 PM
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."
A Child from the Stars
for the Destructionator. The thing is a clear parody that isn't meant to be taken seriously. Will abstain on La though, but thinking about a as well.
Edited by TheCosmicCollector on Jan 18th 2024 at 3:14:04 PM
"If we're gonna play Owl House, we're gonna NEED an Owl House!"
Berserk Button: misusing Berserk Button
La; unlike Queen Grimhilde, who’s skeletons are in an explicit Torture Cellar and gets a brief but notable scene focusing on one of the victims, this just seems like Fridge Horror.
Showtime!
to destructinator and La
La
....Phenomenal
![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_up_emote.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
for Laura and Lapino.
Abstain on Abaddon.
for Destructinator and La.
Unofficial co-Wiki Curator for Magnificent Bastard
Xie: Mmm, fine, I see your point. I'll wait until the new Germany rework to see if a new heinousness standard is made. And as others said, I'll take a quick break to get everything together.
MB Pending | MB Drafts | MB Dates
Not the Eye
I will post my first ever proposal, if that is fine with everyone.
What's the work?
Mother Russia Bleeds is a beat em up video game set in an Alternate History 1980s USSR, where the country is under the thumb of The Mafiya.
Who is the Premier? What has he done?
The Premier of the Soviet Union (seemingly modeled after Mikhail Gorbachev) colluded with the Bratva by orchestrating a raid on a Romani camp to kidnap dozens of people and experiment on them with a horrific drug called Nekro. The player's character (one of four possible, I will use Ivan for simplicity as I chose him in the replay) is among them, being kept in a lab and experimented on for a month until he develops a debilitating addiction, which periodically causes him painful hallucinations. In the first level, they explore the laboratory their taxes funded, where the results of these tests are shown; many humans and animals are subject to torturous testing to consume the drug, which either gruesomely killed them in an overdose, or turned them into rabid junkies the protagonist is forced to fight. As our hero battles their way through Russia, they return to the camp and find it overrun with violent drug dealers who have turned the people into miserable addicts clawing for their next fix; one man who resisted them was brutally killed to make an example of. The people of Russia, fed up with the criminal corruption unleashed by the Nekro epidemic, are organized to lead a protest in the capital, which turns the whole city violent after soldiers are ordered to start shooting and beating protestors. The military is preparing to march upon Moscow and massacre all dissidents, so our hero besieges the Kremlin to punish the government official behind the violence.
Fighting through the Government HQ, Ivan finds the Premier in the middle of shagging a prostitute, upon which he runs away. Ivan chases him to his office, confronts him over the conspiracy, and then faces his security forces as he tries to escape by helicopter. The player stops the Premier, who insults his troops for failing, vainly offers a bonus to whoever kills the intruder, then tries to negotiate with the protagonist for his life, only for Ivan to suffer a massive hallucination and battle the embodiment of his Nekro addiction. Whatever happened in the real world leaves the Premier a bloody mutilated corpse nailed to a table with knives, and the rest of his special forces similarly slaughtered. Ivan either dies of an overdose or lives to be see Russia cleaned of its ills, depending on whether you healed during the final boss.
Mitigating factors?
In his dialogue, the Premier claims the Bratva pressured him to fund the labs/drug production/abductions under duress, and he believed Nekro was just a synthetic chemical. However, the tone of the conversation frames not-Gorabchev as not a sympathetic victim of coercion, but an ambivalent unrepentant collaborator who threw his country to the wolves. He shows zero remorse for the horrors he enabled, mocks the player with racist insults for calling out the atrocities, and then sics the Spetznaz on him as soon as he can, implying he fabricated the details to stall for time, or was trying to shirk responsibility for his nonchalant corruption. And even if this does count against him, it doesn't absolve him of the excessive force unleashed on the protestors, which is literally compared to a genocide and should be bad enough by itself.
Otherwise, his first on-screen appearance is getting caught with a hooker and calling her "his favorite", but obvious lust aside this doesn't really detract from his crimes. Furthermore, he has a portrait of a dog in his room, but it's not referenced by him at all, nor is it even clear that it belongs to him, so it's as mitigating as Blofeld's cat.
Heinous standards?
He is the standard, selling out his country to become a squalid mafia narco-state, funding the use of human lab rats for what is basically krokodil on steroids, and sending the army in to violently quash his citizens when they stand against his corruption. Almost every boss in the game is either an agent of his government, a peddler of the drugs he facilitated, or a mutant created by the experiments. The only levels he can't really be pinned for are the night club with a BDSM torture/murder dungeon, and an brutal arena where enemies are sent to their deaths, which are run by the mob. But it's explicit the premier covering for these criminals indirectly makes him responsible.
Final Verdict?
I hope this is worth discussion, let me know if I did anything wrong.
Goku Black
Premier of the Soviet Union
Good job on a first ep by the way. Anyway I'm heading off on vacation for the weekend so won't be availble on either thread till Monday.
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."
Not the Eye
to Premier, good first ep.
Enjoy your vacation mir.
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Ah, I know that game! My issue is, IIRC, he's too much a tool of the Bratva. That was my main gripe with that game: We never see his superior.
Like, how much is on him and how much is on the Bratva?
Edited by ACW on Jan 18th 2024 at 5:56:56 AM
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
Lizzid people!
Unsure on this one, but thought to do it before any bad weather comes in.
What is the work?
Night Swim is a 2024 horror film distributed by Blumhouse and written and directed by Bryce McGuire based on his 2014 short film of the same name. The film follows the Waller family lead by Ray and his wife Eve as they try to find a stable home to live due to Ray having to retire from his career as a baseball player when he develops multiple sclerosis. But it doesn't seem that bad. They have their own pool, right? Aside from the disappearances, of course.
Who is it? What has it done?
The nameless entity lurking in the Waller family's pool is the main antagonist of the film looking like some rotten, aquatic corpse. According to Kay Fuller, the previous owner of the house, the pool was once connected to a healing spring where the sick were cured of their ailments... at the cost of a loved one being sacrificed. As indicated by the photos Eve discovered during her research, the creature has been dragging people into the water and trapping their souls in a Sunken Place-esque spiritual dimension for a long time.
- In the summer of 1992, Kay's daughter, Rebecca, is lured into the pool when she notices her younger brother Tommy's toy boat. She goes to retrieve it, but falls into the water where she is then dragged down and drowned by the monster. It is revealed that the creature compelled Kay into sacrificing her daughter (and possessed her body) in return for her son getting cured. He gets better, but eventually abandons his mother for understandable reasons.
- When the Waller family moves into the abandoned house, the monster makes a cut in Ray's hand which I guess means he made a Deal with the Devil albeit in a subtle fashion. When Ray is recommended to take up aerobic exercises, he starts using the pool and his illness seemingly goes into remission. True, it came at the cost of the family cat getting killed because horror movie requires a pet getting iced, and his children getting attacked by the demonic entity, but...yay?
- However, if Ray was getting better, that meant that the entity was going to take one of his children as a sacrifice as payment. It attacks and nearly drowns Izzy and later singles out Elliot as its next target.
- During a public pool party that the Wallers throw, the creature takes full possession of Ray leading to him nearly drowning a boy by holding him underwater, but this is passed off as just a result of his ailments.
- The monster tries trapping Elliot in the pool, nearly encasing him under the pool cover if not for Eve's speedy arrival. The monster attempts to kill Izzy through her possessed father gleefully displaying sadistic relish in what it was doing. It sends both Eve and Elliot to that spiritual dimension I mentioned earlier and are attacked by the feral ghosts of the monster's former victims. The spirit of Rebecca, however, intervenes and shows them the way out.
- Ray is freed from his possession, but seeing that the monster would not stop until it had claimed a sacrifice, he sacrifices himself to save his children. The pool is then drained and filled in with dirt to prevent anyone else from using it.
Freudian Excuse? Mitigating factors?
It has a personality that being of a sadistic monster who uses voice mimicry to lure victims and takes relish at trying to kill its targets. There are no indications that it lacks agency. As for its relationship with the people it "heals" by allowing them access to its healing water, it is largely pragmatic, more so parasitic as it is an all take deal where it claims a sacrifice and possesses its host to drive them to consenting to the sacrifice.
Is it bad enough?
It drowns its victims and sends them to another dimension where they are hostile and has some child victims either successful or attempted. Given how it is established in film that the monster has been around since at least 1623, it has been actively killing for 4 centuries.
Edited by AustinDR on Jan 18th 2024 at 3:22:19 AM
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Eh, sure to the entity. Film has a page.
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
Could go either way on Cell quote, but personally don’t feel it.
@ Draco, don’t feel it, kinda lacks omp.
Edited by EmperorGeode on Jan 18th 2024 at 10:22:06 AM